I would find out later that my parents sussed out where I was being held and spent all day yesterday trying to phone me, but it wasn’t until my fifth day being held at El Presidente’s pleasure that somebody finally got through to me.

That wasn’t before our early morning wake up call. I staggered from the cell into the lock-up area to find some of the other prisoners gathered around what I can only describe as the biggest mess of a human I have ever seen. A guy who had drank so much that he pulled down his pants and had defecated EVERYWHERE, rolled in it, got sick, pissed himself and then passed out. Now I’ve been to some seriously messed up house parties and attended some truly drunken festivals, but this was on a whole new level of JUST PLAIN WRONG.

Why had the police brought him in? To punish us? Why couldn’t they have just left him on the street – it’s not like he could catch pneumonia here, it’s too damn warm. He STANK. He had excrement all over his feet, it was in his hair, all over the floor. My word, I would LOVE to know what this cack monster had been drinking because I would like to use it on my enemies.

The other prisoners were trying to hose him down when I got summoned upstairs – the first time I had left the lock-up in over 120 hours. Isabelle, the assistant to the British Consulate. You angel. She told me that they were doing everything they could to get me out. Once I had answered one call, they couldn’t really stop me – I spent the best part of the day upstairs talking to my Mum and Dad, my girlfriend Mandy, my brothers Alex and Mike… I even did an interview for Granada Reports (North West UK TV). Although everyone had to ring me, I STILL wasn’t allowed to call out. Behind the scenes, people like John Roberto, the Cape Verde Representative in the UK, were doing everything they could to get me out.

Every time the phone went silent for more than ten minutes, I was sent downstairs, back to the cack monster. He had crawled Gollum-like to around the corner of the lock-up, beside the bike with the broken chain. He had managed to defecate himself even more and the whole jail was now resembling the aftermath of a German scat orgy. The fishermen were pressed against the back wall, praying for the wind to change and deliver them from the stench.

And we thought the squat toilets stank. Oh my word.

I felt awful that the fishermen didn’t have the opportunity to go and use the phone. In fact, I felt awful for putting them in this situation in the first place. If the Police had let me make a phone call on the Wednesday, we would have been out on Thursday at the latest, and here we were, five days later and the police where STILL not telling us what was going on.

After a while, the police stopped answering the phone and I had to sit downstairs. The cack monster was returned from whence he came, unlike his cack, which was left all over the floor and up the walls.

At least I knew this would be our last night in the damn jail.